Yael Bartana: Screening: Mir Zaynen Do!
Capitain Petzel is pleased to announce a screening of Yael Bartana’s latest video work Mir Zaynen Do!, on view from 10 to 14 September, coinciding with Berlin Art Week.
In communities of the diaspora, music can be a powerful tool for collectively preserving memories. Along with storytelling, traditional languages, and dancing, songs can represent a living home for stateless nations.
Commissioned by the Jewish Brazilian art space Casa do Povo, Yael Bartana's video Mir Zaynen Do! (2024) brings together two groups from two different diasporas: Coral Tradição, a Jewish Brazilian choir born from the now-destroyed Yiddishland (a nation whose borders were defined by the reach of the Yiddish language itself), and Ilú Obá De Min, an Afro-Brazilian street music ensemble that stems from Candomblé culture. In an exercise of weaving new possible alliances, Bartana's video is an invitation to imagine the emergence of collective bodies beyond fixed identity labels.
The work was shot in the Teatro de Arte lsraelita Brasileiro (TAIB), which was built in the basement of the Casa do Povo in 1960. The TAIB was created for a future that never fully happened: the return of the Yiddish language. Nevertheless, it became the dream theater of the experimental performing arts scene in São Paulo in the 1960s and ’70s. It is in the ruins of this legendary theater that Bartana imagines a time to come – between past and present, memory and pre-enactment, the sung word and collective choreographies.
Yael Bartana employs art as a scalpel inside the mechanisms of power structures and navigates the fine and crackled line between the sociological and the imagination. In her films, installations, photographs, performances and public monuments the artist investigates subjects like national identity, trauma, and displacement, often through ceremonies, memorials, public rituals and collective gatherings.
Bartana co-represented Germany alongside theater director Ersan Mondtag at the Venice Biennale 2024. In 2025 the artist will present a solo exhibition at the North Norwegian Art Center, Lofoten, Norway. Further recent solo exhibitions took place at Weserburg Museum of Modern Art, Bremen; Gammel Strand, Copenhagen; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; Center for Digital Art, Holon; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Jewish Museum Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark.
Bartana‘s works are part of various permanent collections, such as Jewish Museum, Berlin, Tate Modern, London; Jewish Museum, New York; Guggenheim, New York and Abu Dhabi; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among others.
She was awarded the Rome Prize of Villa Massimo 2023/24.
